Pour ceux qui ne seraient pas au courant, si A-Trak était le dj de Kanye West durant une grande partie de sa carrière, il est aussi derrière une bonne partie des gros hits sortis à cette époque par Kanye. Mais voilà, il est très difficile d’avoir des informations sur le processus de création de celui qui aime à se comparer à Dieu et après les révélations d’A-Trak on comprend un peu mieux pourquoi… repreZent était donc ravi de tomber sur ces anecdotes et dont on vous en a retranscrit, pour vous mettre l’eau à la bouche, quelques passages relatant la création de « Stronger ».
Vous trouverez l’origine de nombreux autres morceaux sur genius.com/A-Trak, et y’a pas que du Kanye.

A propos de Stronger :

Parce qu’on aura toujours besoin d’un dj, première partie :
When we got to the hotel, I said, “Dude, sit down. I’m going to play you some great music.” And when I played him “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” he was like, “That’s so dope, play it again! I’m going to sample that!” And I said, “No! Wait, what?” I guess I still had a nineties mentality in terms of sampling, where you’re supposed to find unknown records to use, the way that Q-Tip or The Beatnuts would dig up something that nobody knew before.

Parce qu’on aura toujours besoin d’un dj, deuxième partie:
Later on, we were planning a tour after that and we were pulling up samples and things to add over songs in the live performances. I pulled up the acapella for “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and he just looked at me like “There’s an a-capella?” And said “Yeah, it’s on the 12-inch, everyone has it.” He said, “Do you know how much we struggled to mix that fucking beat because I sampled it with the drums in it from the breakdown? You mean to tell me that there was a fucking acapella?” In the Daft Punk original, there’s a breakdown with just the little compressed drums and the vocals. He sampled that and put his drums over it. The big challenge was how to work his drums around the drums in the sample. That was funny.

Parce que parfois le hasard fait bien les choses :
There’s an openness about Kanye. Early on, because he sampled the Doors for Jay-Z and things like that, people thought that he knew more about “white music” than most rap producers. But some of those things were accidents. He’s just good at spotting something good. His girlfriend at the time played him The Doors. Kanye didn’t grow up listening to classic rock, but when something falls in his lap, he knows if it’s dope, and knows when to make a beat out of it.

Parce qu’on aura toujours besoin d’un dj, troisième partie.
He made the beat and spent months writing and rewriting his verses. At the end, he decided he wanted me to scratch on it, sort of an “it’s only right” kind of thing. So I have a small four-bar scratch solo towards the end, which you can barely hear.
Scratching, and the choice of scratch samples, hadn’t adapted to the new sound of music yet. People still scratched the same scratch samples from the eighties and nineties that come from James Brown records and the like. Meanwhile, music was becoming synthetic. I felt like we, the scratch DJs, needed to create new scratch samples or adapt our choice of samples to a more electronic sound. I put a phaser on my scratch to make it wash with the synths a certain way. It barely sounds like a scratch, which was the intention.